Taking the Responsibility to Think
Over the years, I’ve met some rather opinionated people.
Some of them I actually liked. Some I thought were really brilliant and others
were sadly out-of-touch. Most let their views be known with candor and
humility, though some were arrogant and contentious. But what they all have in
common is this: They have an opinion, it’s theirs, and they’re sticking by it.
We do not need opinions to survive as individuals, but I
suppose it is helpful to have them. On the other hand, as Pascal Boyer points
out in his book Religion
Explained (Basic Books, 2001), in addition to oxygen and nutrition, what
human beings need in order to survive is “information
about the world around them” and “cooperation
with other members of the species” (120). Unfortunately, these are two
“commodities” that are in rather short supply at the moment. The quantity of
information is high enough, but whether it is accurate and useful is something
else. And whatever cooperation there may be, it cannot be said to extend much
beyond one’s own group and its handlers. So maybe what is really unfortunate is
the fact that both information and cooperation have become commodities.
There can be little doubt that the information in our social
and political marketplace comes with partisan agenda, and arguably this
contributes to the absence of cooperation among us. Dissensus is expected in a
democracy, especially in one such as ours where there is what John Rawls has
referred to in his book Political
Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1996) as “a diversity of opposing and
irreconcilable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines” (3-4). Certainly
the issue of toleration enters here because as Rawls observes—along with our nation’s
founders—these differences of opinion are themselves the product of two things:
the powers of human reason and enduring free institutions. Can a society be
just and fair, marked by cooperation in the processes and systems that are put
in place in order to maximize the possibility that all citizens can realize
their potential, their personal, social, economic, and religious goals? Is
justice possible in a society where dissensus exists but controversy and
disputations are resolved by reasoned debate and decision-making? To parse the
issue as Rawls has: “how is it possible for there
to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who
remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral
doctrines?”
Based on the status of socioeconomic and political matters
at the moment, the answer to Rawls question would have to be that it isn’t
possible. The problem is not just the fact of dissensus, reasoned as it may or
may not be on any given issue. Rather the problem is also exacerbated, as I
noted in a previous blog, by the political cognoscenti and their partisan and
ideological discourse. It is fundamentally rule by the few whose vested
interests and rhetoric frame the public policy discussions regarding matters
that impinge on “liberty and justice for all.” Political discussion is
effectively a cacophony of ideological voices seeking to sway the public in one
direction or another. Now reasoned arguments are intended to persuade; such
debate is a vital form of dissemination of “information” that can foster
“cooperation.” But fear mongering and appealing to xenophobia, classism,
ethnocentrism, racism, and other forms of social and economic prejudices are not
reasoned arguments by any stretch of the imagination.
As the recipients of this discourse of the political
elites—the politicians, bureaucrats, think-tankers, policy wonks, and media
personalities who know better than the rest of us—most of the public is left to
dwell in this “pseudo-environment,” this “medium of fictions,” having been told
what to think, or to form an opinion on an issue out of information that is
incomplete, misleading, exaggerated, concocted, or just plain false. The
political elite adapt their peculiar messages to appeal to social and political
instincts, knowing that people value information that conforms to and confirms
their existing beliefs and biases. This is the principle of belief congruence,
as articulated by Milton Rokeach in his book, Beliefs, Attitudes and Values: A Theory of Organization and Change
(Jossey-Bass, 1968). We not only tend to gravitate toward ideas that proximate
dispositions we already hold, but “we tend to value people in proportion to the
degree to which they exhibit beliefs, subsystems, or systems of belief
congruent with our own” (83). Poets refer to this as “birds of a feather flock
together,” but by any description it functions as the homogeneity principle or
the law of attraction: “Like attracts like.”
The principle of belief congruence, coupled with the
relative absence of critical reflection and evaluation of political messaging
and information, leaves us with a body politic the majority of whom are cognitively
and attitudinally predisposed to accept certain beliefs and attitudes while
rejecting others. And as the political elite have elevated the tone and content
of partisan messaging, we ought not to be surprised that significant numbers of
those in the political middle, the moderates or centrists, have in recent years
gravitated to one of the two ideological extremes, leaving us with what Alan
Abramowitz in a recent book
has called “the disappearing center.” Writing in the Hedgehog
Review, William Galston notes that there is clearly less polarization
among less-informed and less-engaged citizens, but that the polarization that
does exist among the well-informed and political elite may actually discourage
less well-informed voters from participating altogether in the process. It
would be tragic indeed if the behavior of our political leaders in our open
political system was a primary culprit in reducing levels of participation on
our democracy.
It would seem that responsibility for this state of affairs
in partisan politics extends also to the instruments of mass communication;
after all, the media is no less a part of the messaging structure and the
network of cognoscenti than any other sector of the political elite. What is
remarkable about the communications media at this point is that it too has
functionally abandoned core principles on which this nation was founded. While
there is much trumpeting of the freedom of the press, especially by the media
itself, what many consumers of media messaging fail to recognize is that the
media is no less captivated and constrained by ideology and no less an
instrument of partisan influence on opinion formation. The media as institution
contributes to the construction and maintenance of the “pseudo-environment” and
the “medium of fictions”; they too are fabricating a variety of worlds and
worldviews that legitimate them.
What is especially tragic about the way in which the media
has been co-opted is that in the early days of our country, the media struggled
to remain free of state control; the freedom of the press had to do with the right
of newspapers and publishers to disseminate ideas and opinions unhindered by
government repression or censorship. But as John B. Thompson has noted in his
book Ideology and Modern Culture
(Stanford University Press, 1990), the evolution and expansion of newspaper and
publishing industries, the concentration and commercialization of media
industries, and the development of new media technologies have produced a form
of media monopolization: “an unprecedented degree of concentration—both of
resources and of power—in the private domain” (252).
In effect, the media of mass communication now serve not the
public interest but the commercial interests of private and corporate
enterprises, and “the corporate concentration of resources in the media
industries is not just a threat to the individual qua consumer: it is also a threat to the individual qua citizen” (262). All of the major
media outlets are owned and operated as for-profit businesses by large corporations: Walt
Disney (ABC, ESPN and others); General Electric/Comcast (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC,
Telemundo and others); TimeWarner (HBO, Cinemax, TBS, TNT, CNN and others); News
Corp. (Fox, Fox News, 20th
Century Fox and others); CBS (CBS Showtime, the Movie Channel and others); and
Viacom (MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET and others)—see also here
and here.
Noticeably absent from this list is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a
nonprofit entity established by an act of Congress in 1968 to promote the
development of public media across the country. Its continued funding is at
risk as a result of partisan political interests, but CPB ought also to be
included as a media institution playing a “communications” role in our society.
As the now retired Columbia sociologist Herbert J. Gans
noted in his book, Deciding What’s News
(Northwestern University Press, 1979), “When reporters can explicitly attribute
information to a source, they do not have to worry about reliability (and
validity), the assumption being that once a story is ‘sourced,’ their
responsibility is fulfilled, and the audiences must decide whether the source
is credible” (130). This is now our information problem writ large: passing on what a spin-master or putative expert thinks
now counts as “news,” when in fact, as pointed out to Gans by a magazine
writer, “we don’t deal in facts but in attributed opinions.”
If we consider the extraordinary influence on opinion that
the instruments of mass communication exercise, it is somewhat disheartening to
learn that so many citizens and residents get their news from these commercial
enterprises, disheartening but not surprising. According to survey research done
by Pew
Research Center and published in September 2010, 58% of respondents
indicated that they had watched the news on television the previous day, and
34% said they listened to news on the radio on the previous day. Both of these
numbers are largely unchanged over recent years. What has changed over the last
few years is the percentage of persons getting their news online rather than on
TV, radio or newspaper. From 2004, this number has risen ten percentage points
to 34%, slightly higher than the number who read a hardcopy newspaper (31%). Since
1994, the amount of time spent watching and/or listening to the news or reading
a newspaper had declined. Among those adults who are under age 30, slightly
more than one in four (27%) get no news at all on any given day. Little wonder,
then, that the American public—both voting and non-voting—are so largely
misinformed and manipulated by those who believe themselves to know better.
The challenge that lies before us as citizens in this country,
by comparison to the present status of political posturing and partisanship,
appears to be both monumental and burdensome, especially for those who are unwilling
or unable to take the time to think critically for themselves. The achievement
of our Republic came not by taking the shorter, less obstructive routes, but by
meeting the obstacles to human liberty and economic freedom with the full
resources of personal devotion, disciplined volition, and forceful cognition.
In the course of this project minds and hearts—and lives—were changed. For us to advance as a nation, with all our
diversity, we too will have to gird ourselves for thinking differently,
assessing old views and forming new ones, jettisoning old opinions and
buttressing truer belief systems that stand a greater chance of realizing the
communitarian vision of the common good, the well-being of all.
This undoubtedly will entail risk and vulnerability, and it
certainly will involve being open-minded in ways that we as a nation of
citizens and residents have not shown of late. But as now-retired U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Stephen Breyer noted
in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air,
“open-minded is, you may well have a point of view but you’re open to changing
it.”
Comments